Views from Crestmont Drive

A similar broad theme today. This goes along with the item two days ago about J.D. Vance’s notion of “Heritage Americans” who, in his fascist, hierarchical mindset, are more deserving to run America than others.

Jerry Coyne, yesterday: The two-state delusion

Coyne, the author of Why Evolution Is True and Faith vs. Fact, both of which I’ve reviewed here, is Jewish and occasionally addresses this topic. I studiously ignore it, most of the time; I can’t admire either side. I do understand why Christians support Israel, but their reasons, based on religion, are part of the problem. This kind of thing can’t go on. The world is filling up, with more and more people who seem unable to get along with each other, i.e. live in a non-tribal manner.

Coyne points out that neither Israel nor Palestine wants a two-state solution. For similar reasons. I’m quoting someone he quotes.

One of the top reasons that Israelis and Palestinians alike say peaceful coexistence is not possible is disagreement over the land.

Some think there is not enough land to split. For example, one Palestinian woman said that “Palestine cannot be divided into two states.” Another said that “there cannot be two peoples when there is no room for two peoples.” Israelis express similar sentiments – saying, for example, that “Israel does not have enough territory to divide into two states” or that “there is no land to establish a Palestinian state.”

In both places, there are people who believe they are the only rightful owners of the land. One Jewish Israeli woman said, “This is our land alone,” and another stated that “the Holy Land belongs only to the Jewish people and was given to them by God.” Similarly, some Palestinians say Israel “stole our land” and that “the homeland belongs to the Palestinians.”

Look people. The world is filling up with humanity. There is only so much land. If rival tribes can’t figure out how to live in peace, then conflict and killings will continue, reducing the size of each tribe. Whereas tribes who learn to get along and cooperate — much of the rest of the world — will survive preferentially. That’s how it works.

The same principle applies to the “Heritage Americans” who try not to be offended by immigrants who aren’t white but in their hearts think they are the ones who should rule.

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Similarly.

Washington Post, opinion by Fareed Zakaria, today: Trump and Xi wrestle with the laws of nature

Note the subtitle: “Survival depends on adaptation. For the U.S. and China, that may include cooperation.”

As the summit this week demonstrated, Presidents Donald Trump and Xi Jinping are searching for ways to work together despite the growing rivalry between the two countries. They might take a look at a striking, somewhat unnoticed case of quiet cooperation involving American and Chinese technologies.

Recalling the Hugging Face AI attack.

To summarize: An American AI broke into an American technology company. To figure out what happened, the company ended up using a Chinese AI.

Many examples. Discussion of a book called Darwin’s Lock by Joshua Cooper Ramo. And acknowledgement of the common simplistic take about Darwinian evolution.

We tend to hear “survival of the fittest” and imagine nature as an endless struggle in which one creature devours another. But evolutionary fitness actually means the ability to adapt successfully to changing conditions. Nature is full not just of competition but of specialization, symbiosis and cooperation.

Adaptation. Not competition, but cooperation.

Zakaria concludes:

For 30 years, we made one mistake about globalization: We assumed trade would eradicate geopolitics. Now we risk making the opposite mistake — assuming geopolitics can simply erase the realities of a global, deeply interconnected economy.

Personal aside: yes, there was a time when many of us thought that trade among nations, even those who had once been at war, would overcome the tribal urge for dominance. For example, I bought a Japanese car in 1982, my first car, on the basis of car magazine reviews, and my thoughts that trade with Japan was a positive thing, a way to advance international cooperation. My father thought it was a bad idea, only for geopolitical reasons. As with much else in life, international trade has worked fine (no one squints disapprovingly at anyone owning a Japanese or German car), but it’s more complicated than that. Now I own a German car. The international economy remains. The geopolitics hasn’t gone away.

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Back to the theme about America’s abdication of its leadership in the world, as in yesterday’s post.

Robert Reich, today: What to plan for in the U.S. if you’re a foreign leader?, subtitled “Here’s what I’m hearing”

It’s long been thought, by many Americans and many other nations, that Trump and his administration is a passing fad, a temporary lapse of American sanity, and once he goes away all his damage could be reversed. But the longer he goes on, the more he destroys, physically and intellectually, the harder it will be to recover. We’ve already seen signs that America’s reputation in the world is damaged, for the long term. (MAGA doesn’t care about the world.)

Reich:

I spent much of this week talking with foreign officials who are in the U.S. for United Nations meetings. I was curious to know how they’re strategizing about the United States in the future — assuming Democrats do well in the midterm elections and Trump becomes a lame-duck president. (None of my nine sources were heads of state; my stature doesn’t reach that high. But they were high enough to give me some useful insights.)

Then what he’s learned. I’ll condense. Well, no I won’t.

1. Most are thinking past Trump. They believe his influence is already waning, and his bellicose rantings show that he knows it. He’s still dangerous, they say, but not nearly as dangerous as he was, and he’s no longer capable of plunging the world into war. Every one of them told me he’s deeply unpopular in their countries.

2. They’re thinking in a timeframe of five to 10 years. They see Trump as a temporary phenomenon and assume the United States will “return to its senses.”

3. But — and here’s the part that concerned me — they’re unsure they can ever again rely on the United States for world leadership. Several pointed out that the fact Americans elected Trump for a second time reveals, in the words of one of them, “there’s something troublesome about your nation that transcends Trump.”

4. Even post-Trump, they see the United States as unstable and unpredictable. They don’t believe the country will fall into civil war, but they worry that policymaking will cycle between extremes because, in the words of another, “your extreme inequality will make it difficult to achieve any longer-term consensus.”

5. As a result, they’re looking ahead to a world where another nation, or group of nations, will take leadership on global issues that need to be addressed, such as climate change, AI, migration, widening inequalities, Putin’s aggression, and disease prevention.

6. Which nation or group? Another official put it to me this way: “We don’t trust China, the U.N. doesn’t work because of its security council, but the EU isn’t strong enough yet. Several of us are hoping that over the next decade the EU will be joined by Canada, Japan, South Korea, Australia, and New Zealand, and that this new EU — really, a World Union — will devise a structure that enables it to work collaboratively and forcefully for the good of the world.”

EU becomes a World Union? Cool!

Frankly, I don’t care if the US leads the world, or if some other nations or group of nations does, as long as they can address big picture problems, and advance human well-being. (I am not a ‘patriot’ in the sense that I believe my country is better than all the others just because I… live here. I wasn’t born here.) The existential problems require a cooperative, worldwide response. And America has given up.